patrick.net

Dan8267 says

XP does still rule. It will probably be another year before I upgrade to 8.x.

Any suggestions regarding support/security?

"We can expect to see the usual range of malware running on exploited machines. That malware will be a threat to the machines' users, of course, with exploits that can spy on them and compromise passwords, banking details, and so on. But more problematically, it will also be a threat to everyone else, as compromised XP installations will be recruited into botnets, taking commands from remote systems to perform such tasks as sending spam and participating in denial of service attacks."

"ComputerWeekly reported that the UK government agreed to pay Microsoft £5.548 million (approximately $9.1 million) for continued support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 for all British public sector customers. On Friday, the Dutch government cut its own “multi-million Euro” deal with Microsoft for custom XP support of over 30,000 computers still running the Windows XP operating system."

AVG offer free anti-virus software and Malwarebytes offer free anti-malware, but will they be enough?

curious2 says

Any suggestions regarding support/security?

LInux.

curious2 says

Any suggestions regarding support/security?

I've been running XP SP3 without any further installs for years. I suspect that few if any malware developers will start attacking XP again after the security updates stop.

Quite frankly, it's not worth attacking XP. It's a diminishing share of desktops, and more importantly, the real money is in attacking and installing spyware/adware in mobile devices (smart phones and tablets). That's where the lucrative malware market is.

I'd recommend just using Macrium Reflect to back up your OS partition. Even without malware, it's a good idea to restore an OS image once a year. It takes only a few minutes and your machine runs like new.

Dan8267 says

I suspect that few if any malware developers will start attacking XP again after the security updates stop.

Why wouldn't they?
There will still be millions of people running it and no patching to make hacks become useless.

Heraclitusstudent says

Why wouldn't they?

Because for the same effort, they could make lots more money writing spyware for mobile platforms, and people willingly install spyware on their mobile platforms.

Thinks about it, Windows 98 hasn't been patched in years and no one attacks it.